Given these many contradictions, scholars have argued that rather than build racially egalitarian societies, Latin American elites simply created a more hegemonic and durable form of racial domination than their counterparts had in the United States or South Africa (Hanchard 1994; Marx 1998; Winddance Twine 1998; Winant 2001; Goldberg 2002; Sawyer 2006). According to these accounts, nationalist discourses of race mixture-insomuch as they relied on the logic of colorblindness and the silencing of racial critique-have often served to mask the reality of continued racism and structural inequality. It comes as something of a surprise then that nearly every Latin American country would change course so dramatically with respect to ethno- racial questions beginning in the late 1980s. In some cases, this shift also meant that state officials would recognize the persistence of racism within their societies for the first time in their histories.

When I heard the theme for this month was ‘identity’, the word crisis as an appendage kept coming to mind. As a mixed person it, it seems as though the word “crisis” is constantly attached to identity, as though there is confusion somewhere. This is problematic. Other phrases that have become synonymous with “mixed race” include: ‘unsure of themselves’, ‘in-between’, ‘not one, not the other’, etc. It becomes a little exasperating, especially if, like me, you don not relate to such notions of bi- and multi-racial identity. It sometimes seems alien to some that an identity crisis is not an inevitable part of your coming of age. I’d like to take this opportunity to say that identity crises are not a universal truth for those of mixed heritage…